Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and the U.S.’, (but also NATO’s), actions in the RL Afghanistan showed it to everyone, loud and clear, on August 16, 2021…onwards. I really want to talk about it, but, conversely, many other people have already talked, and are talking, and will be talking about this for a long time from now on, so let us talk about something else – the second episode of ‘What If?’
What happens here, of course, is that Disney/Marvel/MCU are
trying to erase J. Gunn’s live-action GotG franchise and replace it with a
better one, one that is animated. I am guessing that whatever beef they had
with ScarJo in regards to the ‘Black Widow’ movie pales in face of their feud
with J. Gunn! What next?
Well, the Western world will need to figure out what to do
now that the Taliban, as well as their Pakistan backers and superiors have won
a major score – oh, we are talking about ‘What If?’ No…well, yes, but here is
where ‘The Suicide Squad’ deserves a special mention.
The new version of the 2016 film is a good movie although it
has its flaws, just as the 2016 version had its’ virtues. For example, in 2016,
Waller was assembling a team that was supposed
to be custom-made, to be precisely tailored to deal with various threats…on
behalf of the American government, (cough). Yes, it didn’t go smoothly, not
quite to plan, but in the end? The titular characters actually delivered…pretty
much as Waller and her cohorts had expected them to be, and maybe even
surpassing the expectations, (not that there was too much height to clear). Here,
in the 2021 version, the Wall not so much assembled as collected a literally
motley crew of bits and pieces that don’t even fit together, and make MCU’s AoS
crew seem cohesive – and has the gall to be surprised when the mission
literally dissolves into shite.
…No, I am not talking about the massacre on the beach but
about how the team Bloodsport did its’ job in the completely opposite direction
from where the Wall…assumed that it would go, apparently? Seriously, she
collected some of the worst people in the DC-verse and sent them off with
minimal oversight – Colonel Rick Flagg and whatever means of keeping an eye on
both teams, (drones? Satellite cameras?). The result was that Flagg died and
the news about the American government’s involvement with Jotunheim and Starro
leaked out all the same – something that Waller wanted to avoid. Peacekeeper was
nullified, Blackguard died, and her FBI underlings turned on her, (guess they
heard what she did to their predecessors in the first movie). I have no idea as
to what agent Waller will do next, but that is not why the movie failed. Rather,
it failed because the American audiences had their fill of movie theaters for
the moment, plus all of the baggage that was carried over from the first
Suicide Squad movie, one that HBO/WB/DC/whoever never managed to quite divorce
from the new one…
Back to ‘What If?’ Yeah, sort of. In the first GotG film, we
had a ragtag group of characters, literally, who went forth and saved the
galaxy. In the second film, they progressed, becoming more competent and more
comfortable together. Moreover, in the ‘Infinity War’ and ‘Endgame’ movies, they
did their best to stop Thanos, and stop him they did…with losses along the way,
but that was unavoidable.
And now we got the second ‘What If?’ episode that has none
of that, but instead we got T’Challa succeeding at practically everything that
Peter Quill had struggled with. Maybe that is justifiable, but as we have seen
in MCU, both in CA: CW and the first ‘Black Panther’ film, T’Challa has had his
own problems so clearly, in his ‘What If?’ episode, (Earth-TRN877), this might
be some very alternative T’Challa, (though he and Yondu both were fought to a
standstill, cough, by this dimension’s Collector)… Anything else?
The tendency to play it safe as it was depicted in the
series’ premiere is running here true too – all of the characters are familiar to
us, its’ their roles that change. In the series’ premiere, this was downplayed,
sort of, but now and here, in the episode 1x02, it is played-out to the max, in
an almost vaudeville-like manner. So, what next?
Sadly, I have no idea, or at least – no concrete idea. I
have some theories, but nothing that I want to air for the moment. Therefore,
for now, this is it – see you all soon instead.
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